Muddy roads, the houses with plain iron sheet roofs and rusting walls, children playing in the field and women plaiting hair by the roadside are the typical sights that greet you when you get to Soweto.
One day in 2023, residents of the low-income settlement in Kahawa West in Nairobi came and stood under the water gushing from a borehole near the entrance into the settlement.
Nancy Wamaitha watched in awe, and she still remembers the spectacle: “People came to shower in their clothes.”
The celebration was befitting given the magnitude of what had happened in Soweto, which, like many slum areas in Nairobi, had limited access to water.
In 2020, Nancy, part of the Enterprise Business Unit (EBU) team at Safaricom, visited Soweto to give back to the community through Safaricom’s Pamoja scheme.
The Pamoja Scheme is a project that enables Safaricom staff to engage in a community project of their choice within the communities they serve.
“So we started by doing a feeding program for the kids, then we also empowered the women in the area who lacked jobs by giving them tea urns, eggs, and sewing machines so that they could start businesses and earn,” said Nancy.
However, one major essential still lacked in the community, and this led to her next big project in Soweto.
“I could see a lot of people buying water from out of the place and so I needed people to get water. But honestly, it never crossed my mind that that was the next big project that we were going to do,” said Nancy.
While Nancy was going on with her day-to-day work, she got a call from a friend asking her to help a team from Water is Life, a Non-Governmental Organisation, access Soweto, where they wanted to start a water project.
The foreigners were apparently afraid that the close-knit community in the slum would deny them access and needed a link to the community.
“I never knew there was water beneath me. So when I got to learn about the stagnant borehole, we went and checked it out, had meetings, and then we agreed this is the project we want to do,” said Nancy.
They then had Davis and Shirtliff test the water and establish that it was good for consumption, and they then revived the borehole, which had been stagnant for 60 years.
The project was not without challenges, like being stopped because they needed clearance from a regulator, and agreeing with one ‘chairman’ in the area but finding out later that the ‘chairman’ reported to a more senior ‘chairman’.
Today, the borehole is active and serves the whole community in Soweto. It also serves Mwamko Children’s Home, the Kahawa West Primary and Kahawa West Hospital.
At Safaricom, Nancy was in 2024 one of the recipients of the CEO Awards, which are given to people who have done outstanding work.
“When my name was called out and I could hear the story, I blacked out. That is my story being spoken about there, and just to hear that story being resaid there, that made me feel very good, and I realized that whatever we are doing, we might not see the impact from ourselves, but when you tell the story, that is where the impact is,” she said.
Watch the video below to see more of the Soweto water story.
